I can’t write authentically about anything other than early bereavement right now. Except maybe compound bereavement, complex bereavement, working as a therapist while you are actively bereaved. After your toes have been curled around the edge of the abyss watching several loved ones slowly slowly fall into it every single day for a year or two.

How you think, but you have thought before, that it has stopped – that the dying has paused – and that maybe the universe will offer you a decade or two to catch your breath before you again lose someone who is part of your psychological and logistical infrastructure – but what if it doesn’t pause (last time it didn’t) and what if it keeps going – and swallows someone else up you love, or you?

What if lightening strikes repeatedly in the same spot? What if freak events, school shootings, car accidents, house fires, drug overdoses, aneurisms or just more cancer cancer cancer keep coming?

About the feeling of falling down a rabbit hole, the floor pulled out from under you, and having no idea when or if you will hit solid ground again.

About the terror of looking forward – because it means encountering the days, years, minutes ahead without someone who you might have assumed would travel through time with you but is gone, and not just gone for right now, but gone always. Never to be seen or heard again

I can only in this moment write about how it is also hazardous to look back – because if you calculate all that you have negotiated and all the heartbreak of the death and dying cluster you hope you have passed through (but who really knows for sure) you will feel a fatigue so great, so crushing, so heavy that you know your body actually demands three solid months of sleep to recover – but there are children to care for and bills to pay, and the unflinching and unceasing demands of life to keep up with.

And the past has other dangers – sometimes called memories – which can comfort and soothe and strengthen you but can also turn against you into a brutal accounting of what exactly has been taken from you, and what is no longer with you in the present moment.

About the strange alienation when you hear normal people talking about everyday things – and who, understandably try to engage you in conversation about everyday things, while you are actually still living in the crack between the worlds where every second is both sacred and terrible and as far from everyday as humanly imaginable – but you somehow – strangely- without understanding how – are still able to chat and smile and nod and act “as if” you are a part of this earth – when you haven’t really come back yet, and aren’t sure who you will be when you do return.

And the times when you do feel normal – uncannily normal – like nothing happened, nothing changed – when you go about your business, and again, kind and well meaning people treat you as if you are still altered (you aren’t are you?) but you feel regular and you just want to cash in on that for the time being but everyone’s concern disrupts the illusion and you remember you have just had a human being that you cherished amputated from your life.

The self-compassion that you have to cultivate in order not to push or shame yourself, when you feel nothing, or you feel totally fucked up, or you feel fine, or you feel the worst, searing burning pain, or you feel terrified, or you feel lost, or you feel a little manic-y in your love of life, your appreciation for what is good or kind or just or beautiful, or your slightly panicked need to say every positive grateful thing you feel to the people around you over and over again in case you don’t get to say it later, or in case the moment arrives where you will never get a chance to say it at all.

How you search for places to put your thinking – or behaviors to engage in – that comfort you for a second and how you hope that thought or that photo, or that song, or that peaceful spot doesn’t dry up on you and lose its ability to function as a balm for all your sorrows.

Gathering your thoughts before sleep, trying to court dreams which make this make sense, or which offer consolation.

And how, you go to work, and you want to go to work, to tend to and care for others who mean the world to you – and stand shoulder to shoulder beside other people who are contending with challenges and suffering, loss, illness, bereavements, alienations of their very own – and your power to take those in, take those on, and mirror it all back can make your own wound useful – but can also exhaust you and expose you to profound re-injury – the most painful kind of re-wounding when you work from your vulnerability and it is rejected or attacked.

And can you really withstand that right now?

Usually, yes, absolutely. The connection and the potential of intimacy makes it all worth it, and probably there is an internal mandate to keep doing it because what else can you do? What other way of working in the world will cook this stew into something digestible?

But sometimes momentarily no. Not at all. It is not withstandable and why did I ever take on this fucked up job of absorbing other people’s aggression and confusion and wishes for me to be perfected when I am not I am not, I have never been and I am certainly not now, not at all. Who did I think I was? I suck at this, it is the worst and is there anyway to get out of this at this point?

Suddenly remembering that even your breakability is valuable because it connects you to the brokenness of others

Finding seconds of relief and stacking them upon each other.

Remembering you are grateful for the love that you are now grieving and for the love and kindness, and the attempts at kindness that are all around

Remembering what those you have lost would want for you.

Trying to see yourself as they saw you.

Arguing with them in your head. Giving them back the fucked up bits that they might not have accepted when they were alive.

Learning to speak to yourself in their healthy voice.

Recalling that everything you are contending with that feels unnatural is natural.

That grief is part of the natural order of things, and allowing it to function in your life as a natural force.

And remembering that it is all expectable. Necessary. Unavoidable.

That all this is just grief itself.

Nothing less. Nothing more.

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(For an accompanying discussion on the processes of bereavement and how you can support those in early bereavement please read this. )